


if they haunt me (please collect them)

by deerie



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! - All Media Types
Genre: Alternative Perspective, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 11:19:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19149967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deerie/pseuds/deerie
Summary: “What will you do with me,” Ryou asks, “when you defeat the Pharaoh?”, or a series of questions answered and left unanswered.





	if they haunt me (please collect them)

“What will you do with me,” Ryou asks, “when you defeat the Pharaoh?”

Ryou sits in the middle of his bed. The spirit, barely there, sits in front of him, cradling Ryou’s hand in two of his.

Ryou wonders idly what it must be like to only be able to interact with certain things: the Ring, of course, and Ryou, sometimes. It must be lonely.

The spirit rubs a thumb over the scar in the middle of Ryou’s hand. He touches Ryou’s birdlike wrist with two fingers. The bones shift underneath his touch.

“I would have you draped in gold,” the spirit murmurs. He reaches out to touch Ryou’s collarbone. “Jewels dripping from your neck. Rubies.”

The spirit moves his hand up to touch the delicate skin beneath Ryou’s eye with his thumb. The skin there stretches with his touch. Ryou imagines that there are imprints on him left from the spirit’s hands.

“I would give you what you wish for most.”

Ryou resolutely does not think of what he wishes for most; the spirit can’t give him that, no matter how many promises slip from his lips. Ryou drops his head to hide beneath his bangs, but the spirit is there to catch his chin with a curved hand.

“You just have to say yes,” the spirit says. “Say yes.”

The problem is that Ryou never really stops saying yes.

 

 

The apartment is quiet when Ryou gets home from school. The apartment is always quiet now. Ryou drops his keys on the table near the door and slips off his shoes. He can’t be angry with his friends, not really, for sending the Pharaoh on his final journey, but he wishes that the closing of that door didn’t mean his spirit had to leave too.

Ryou knows what Yugi and the others thought about the spirit: that he was solely focused on revenge, that there were scars on Ryou’s body he couldn’t explain, that he went after what he wanted with a fierce determination that left no one, not even Ryou, standing in his wake.

Ryou sits on his couch in his silent living room and ignores the diorama sitting in the corner. He’s long since pulled a sheet over the city in miniature. There’s no use wishing for things he can’t have. All of the spirit’s promises and he couldn’t even keep this one, the most important one.

To them, the spirit had never been tender. They didn’t think he had the capability to be tender.

Ryou doesn’t know if it a blessing or a curse that he knows otherwise.

 

 

Once upon a time, Ryou wished for friends.

The spirit, in his strange and meandering way, gives him friends. First, in the form of souls trapped in dolls, and later, after capitulating to Ryou’s fervent pleas of, “This isn’t what I meant,” in the form of a boy with a strange pyramid-shaped necklace and the others who constantly orbited him.

It hadn’t mattered to Ryou that the friendship was incidental to the spirit’s plan.

Once upon a time, Ryou wished to never be alone.

The spirit is most eager to give him this.

 

 

“Ask me again,” the spirit says into Ryou’s shoulder blade. “Ask me the question again.”

Ryou sighs, places his homework to the side, and asks, “What will you do to me once you defeat the Pharaoh?”

The spirit nudges and Ryou follows where he leads, slipping to rest on the ground in front of the couch, legs tucked to one side. The spirit brushes his hair back away from his face, guides Ryou’s chin to rest on one outstretched knee.

“What will I do _to_ you,” he ponders, picking up on the misspoken word immediately.

Ryou tucks one hand around an incorporeal ankle and waits him out. The spirit leans back against the cushions, fingers drumming an inaudible beat against the back of the couch.

“I would have you here,” the spirit says finally, “at my feet.”

The spirit reaches out and rests his thumb on Ryou’s plush bottom lip. Ryou blushes deeply. The spirit smirks. He tugs Ryou up by an elbow and Ryou sits, perched on his knees, above the spirit. He wants so badly to sit on his lap and not sink through to the couch below. Ryou braces his hands on the couch behind the spirit’s head.

The spirit trails a hand up along Ryou’s jaw. “I would have you,” he says, “in my bed.”

Ryou leans into his hand.

“You would let me,” the spirit says, a strange look on his face like he thinks maybe Ryou would disagree. “You would say yes.”

Maybe it’s not just about what Ryou wants. Maybe it’s what the spirit wants, too.

 

 

Ryou wakes in the middle of the night

He’s not sure exactly what wakes him up.

He climbs out of his bed and pads out of the room, double checking that the door is locked and all the windows shut. Nothing is amiss, but Ryou can’t help but feel like something changed in the time between when he fell asleep and now.

He stops in the kitchen to pour a glass of water and drinks it at the sink. He leaves the empty cup in the sink.

The hallway seems darker than he left it, but he follows the familiar path back to his room.

Some strange silhouette sits atop his bed. Ryou smacks the bedroom light on.

“What?” he murmurs, wonder coloring his voice, but he can’t think up the right words to use.

It’s his spirit, but not. His spirit is no longer the spitting image of Ryou: he’s tanned like Malik, his hair a darker shade of gray and cut shorter than Ryou keeps his hair, and a large crisscrossing scar sits under one dark eye. His mouth curves into a smirk - it’s such a familiar expression that Ryou could cry.

The spirit leans back on his hands and his legs drift open in invitation, but it’s one Ryou doesn’t know if he can accept.

Ryou steps closer, crossing the distance between the door and the bed, and reaches out to touch the spirit’s face but he stops just short. He doesn’t think he could bare it if this turned out to be some cruel trick.

“You left me,” Ryou says.

The spirit frowns and hums under his breath, the sound deeper than anything he managed to make using Ryou’s vocal cords. He leans forward and sways closer to Ryou, one hand coming to grab Ryou’s outstretched hand and one hand to thumb under Ryou’s eye.

He didn’t realize he was crying; he hadn’t meant to do that.

“That was unfortunate,” his spirit says, squeezing Ryou’s spasming hand in a tighter grip.

The spirit feels more substantial than he did, like he has a real body. Ryou doesn’t know what to think. He still thinks it may be a trick, but he doesn’t know who could be so cruel

“But I’m back now,” the spirit says. “Flesh and blood.”

“How?”

The spirit shrugs. He seems wholly unconcerned with his reappearance into Ryou’s life.

“For-” here, Ryou hesitates. “For me?”

The spirit merely nods. He leans back and uses the momentum to tug Ryou in between his spread knees. “Ask me,” he says. “Ask me the question again.”

“What will you do with me,” Ryou says, aware all at once that he doesn’t know how to finish the question. “What will you do with me now?”

The spirit grins, wild and open, and taps his thumb lightly under Ryou’s eye. “Oh,” he purrs, “we’re going to do so much.”

**Author's Note:**

> The title is bastardized from Jack Johnson's song, Questions. 
> 
> Wow, blast from a fandom way past! I think the last time I wrote for this fandom was in middle school and thankfully, none of those remain. I've been reading a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh recently, though, and thought I'd give it a shot myself. Hope you liked it!


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